Every technology really needs to be shipped with a special manual – not how to use it but why, when, and for what.
ALAN KAYThey don’t like the idea of having different points of view.
More Alan Kay Quotes
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Basic would never have surfaced because there was always a language better than Basic for that purpose.
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Of course I would pipe up with my five-year-old voice.
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When the Mac first came out, Newsweek asked me what I [thought] of it. I said: Well, it’s the first personal computer worth criticizing.
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School is basically about one point of view — the one the teacher has or the textbooks have.
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Quite a few people have to believe something is normal before it becomes normal – a sort of ‘voting’ situation.
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In a well functioning world, tools and agents are complementary.
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I don’t know how many of you have ever met Dijkstra, but you probably know that arrogance in computer science is measured in nano-Dijkstras.
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Science requires a society because even people who are trying to be good thinkers love their own thoughts and theories.
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And when they decided to beef up their OSs, they went to (different) very old bad mainframe models of OS design to try to adapt to personal computers.
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Any company large enough to have a research lab is too large to listen to it.
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The flip side of the coin was that even good programmers and language designers tended to do terrible extensions when they were in the heat of programming, because design is something that is best done slowly and carefully.
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So at the end of the presentation, Steve came up to me and said: Is the iPhone worth criticizing? And I said: Make the screen five inches by eight inches, and you’ll rule the world.
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Any medium powerful enough to extend man’s reach is powerful enough to topple his world.
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People who are really serious about software should make their own hardware.
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Java is the most distressing thing to hit computing since MS-DOS.
ALAN KAY